True grit of a pioneer of the peaks

April 30 2003

Peter Lloyd, Everest climber, 1907-2003

Peter Lloyd, who has died aged 95, was the last surviving member of six expeditions which attempted to conquer Mount Everest between the wars; later, he was credited with helping to develop the use of oxygen, which enabled the peak finally to be climbed in 1953.

Lloyd became a member of H. W. Tilman's seven-man team in 1938 which scorned the lavish expenditure and large retinue of native porters which had characterised expeditions of the 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1938 only a few porters were engaged. Camping arrangements were simple and a spartan diet was provided on the long march through Tibet to the north side of Everest. It was decided to dispense with radio sets, and Tilman would have left behind the oxygen equipment, had it not been for the row that this would have caused in the climbing world.

The expedition took both an open-circuit breathing system, which drew in ordinary air as well as special draughts from a cylinder, and a closed-circuit system, using a completely sealed mask and a mechanism which drew off the carbon dioxide from the recirculated air.

Lloyd conducted comparative tests on both of these at high altitude and came to favour the former. He found that although his pace had not improved, he was less tired by the end.");document.write("

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In the meantime, he increased his favourable standing with Tilman when the two of them swallowed mugfuls of soup together at 8200 metres. But the expedition remained dogged by bad weather and fresh snow, in which the climbers regularly sank up to their hips as they established the lower camps during the first half of May.

They did not reach the North Col until early June, when Tilman, Eric Shipton, Frank Smythe and Lloyd succeeded in establishing further camps at 7800 metres and 8200 metres on successive days.

But at the highest camp Shipton and Smythe found themselves foiled by the extreme cold and deep snow when they attempted the summit. Tilman and Lloyd were similarly thwarted in a second attempt two days later.

On the expedition's return home, the question of oxygen was debated with some heat at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London. Despite the fact that his expedition had tested oxygen with some care, Tilman believed that mountaineering was analogous to sailing, and that any attempt on Everest should be made only with man's natural resources.

But after Tilman and Smythe had voiced their lack of enthusiasm, Lloyd rose to declare: "I have a lot of sympathy with the sentimental objection to its use, and would rather see the mountain climbed without it than with; but, on the other hand, I would rather see the mountain climbed with it than not at all."

Lloyd said he was keen to make another attempt with Tilman, but World War II intervened to prevent any more expeditions. Afterwards, the changing politics of the China region made it impossible to get close to the mountain until 1949, when permission was given for an exploratory climbing party provided it undertook some serious scientific work.

Tilman duly led an expedition. Tenzing Norgay combined the roles of sirdar and cook, while Lloyd carried out photo-theodolite surveys. By then, Tilman noted, Lloyd had become "a little gross" as a result of living in Australia for some months; yet Lloyd was not to undertake his last expedition, to Turkish Kurdistan, for 18 years.

When John Hunt's 1953 expedition was being planned, Lloyd was put in charge of the oxygen, a task requiring technical expertise as well as some tact.

Both kinds of oxygen were taken by the party, but it was the open system, which Lloyd had long favoured over the claustrophobic closed one, that was used by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing when they reached the summit. John Hunt wrote later that oxygen had been vital to the expedition (although a first successful ascent without oxygen was eventually made in 1978).

The son of an economics lecturer, Peter Lloyd was educated at Gresham's School. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read engineering and became president of the university's mountaineering club. He perfected his ice climbing technique in the Alps.

A stocky, well-built man, he was invited in 1936 to join Tilman's Anglo-American expedition to Nanda Devi, which at 7770 metres was the eighth-highest mountain in the Himalayas.

Since Tilman and his long-time climbing partner Eric Shipton were pioneers of lightweight expeditions to the highest mountains, the party, composed of four British and four American climbers, was expected to carry its own loads to the high camps. Lloyd managed to carry his pack over difficult rock up to a bivouac at 7120 metres, from where Tilman and Noel Odell reached the summit of the mountain, then the highest ever climbed. Tilman described Lloyd as "first-rate on rock and ice", and it was no surprise when he asked Lloyd to join his Everest expedition two years later.

In doing so, he cemented a friendship which ended only 43 years later when Lloyd, as president of the Alpine Club, gave the address in St James's Church, Piccadilly, for his old friend, who had disappeared, aged 80, on an expedition aboard a converted tug in the South Atlantic.

Lloyd worked for the Gas Light and Coke Company in London from 1930 until 1941, when the Royal Aircraft Establishment was begun at Farnborough. In 1944 he joined Frank Whittle to work on the jet engine. After the war Lloyd moved to the National Gas Turbine Establishment, becoming deputy director in 1950. He was appointed CBE in 1957.

In 1961, he was made director-general of research and development at the Ministries of Aviation and Technology in London, and then went to Canberra as head of the British Defence Research and Development staff.

On returning to England, Lloyd joined Booth International Holdings. He finally retired to settle in Toowoomba, where he remained an enthusiastic motorist. When he decided to trade in his Jaguar for a Volvo, the car dealer was astonished to find himself selling a new car to a man of 92.

Lloyd, who was twice married, is survived by his second wife, Joyce Evelyn Campbell, and by a son and a daughter from his first marriage.